One of the most annoying things about buying expired domains is all the hours it takes to sift through domains just to find one decent one.

Going back into the wayback machine and checked each year, finding domains, making sure they have decent links, checking out the links, looking at anchor text – it becomes way too much work when you can be focusing on other things like creating content and doing outreach.

To find expired domains I used services like DomCop and ExpiredDomains.net which saved a lot of time because you were able to see all the expired domains in one place along with some basic metrics.

This alone saved a ton of time and DomCop included things like Ahref’s metrics which meant you were able to get a good overall look at the types of domains you were buying.

But Spamzilla goes one step further and automates the whole background check for each domain, so you are able to quickly narrow down the highest quality domains for the best price. At least that’s what it claims to do. But does Spamzilla actually work as advertised?

If you are looking for the short answer – YES! It does a great job of analyzing domains and picking up things that most domain-hunters might have missed.

However it is not 100% perfect, and you still need to do some checked to ensure the domain isn’t spammed.

November 30, 2019 Update: Get 30% off Spamzilla when you enter coupon code: SZBLKF2019 To check out Spamzilla for free, click here.

If you want to learn more, keep reading!

What is Spamzilla?

Spamzilla (https://www.spamzilla.io/)is a cloud-based application that scrapes various auction and expired domain lists and analyzes each domain using its own proprietary software to weed out domains that have been abused or misused previously.

They do this first by scraping Pending Delete, Fully Expired, GoDaddy Auctions, GoDaddy Closeouts, NameJet, and SnapNames auctions and then using Majestic and Ahrefs API’s to get the metrics, backlinks and anchor text of each domain.

Then they run each domain in the archive.org’s Wayback machine and Screenshots.com to see if the domains may have been used as PBN’s or some sort of spam site in the past.

They also look for excessive 301 redirects which can be a red flag for abuse.

Spamzilla then comes out with a “Spamzilla score” of 1 to 100. 1 being super clean, 100 being definitely spammed.

Most domains lie somewhere in between the two, and I haven’t seen a domain get lower than a 3.

How much does Spamzilla cost?

Spamzilla comes in two different versions, the free version and the paid version. The paid version costs $37 per month and gives you full access to all of Spamzilla’s features.

In the free version, you will are only allowed to review 25 domains a month. You do not get access to the full domain list that is available in the paid version.

The paid version allows you to analyze up to 1850 domains a month, and if you need to analyze more you can buy additional credits:

On top of this, the paid version of Spamzilla has a database of expired domains that are constantly being updated every day.

The domains are then filters using industry-standard metrics such as Moz (DA, PA) Ahrefs (DR,UR) and Majestic (TF, CF).

A look inside Spamzilla

What’s a good Spamzilla Score?

The “safe” Spamzilla score is 20 and below. From using Spamzilla extensively over the past couple of weeks (and snapping up some great domains at the same time) I agree with this score and my default setting for filtering out domains is usually set at 20 and below.

However, there have been times where I have spotted a domain that was obviously spammed with a score of less than 20. I have also seen domains that look a little spotty, but are overall clean that have a Spamzilla score of above 20.

Spamzilla Tutorial

The Spamzilla interface can seem a bit overwhelming at first, but it is actually very easy to use and intuitive after you spend some time with it.

When you first open Spamzilla you are given a database as above. Here is a breakdown of what all the columns mean:

Domain: The website name that is available to buy

Source: The source where you can buy the domain, can be expired and free to pick up anywhere, or auction which needs to be purchased from an auction website

TF: Majestic’s Trust Flow a good metric to look at to see the “Trustworthiness” of a website, the higher the number the better

CF: Majestic’s Citation Flow, you want the TF and CF to be in a similar ratio – if the CF is higher than the TF it is likely to be spam

Maj BL: Majestic’s Back Links, usually the more backlinks a domain has the better. However, sometimes too many backlinks mean the domain has been spammed.

Maj RD: Majestic’s Referring Domains, again the more referring domains the better. But too much can sometimes mean spam.

Maj Topics: Majestic’s Topics – a good quick way to see what niche a domain to find topically relevant domains

Site Lang: Main language the backlinks are in.

Moz DA: Moz’s Domain Authority – the most popular metric used to determine overall domain strength, however, can be easily manipulated.

Moz DA: Moz’s Page Authority – how powerful the main page of the domain is. Similar to Ahref’s UR metric

Age: Age of the domain from the time it was registered. However it could have been dropped at any point or not active during that time.

SZ Score: The money metric, this is Spamzilla’s spam score, the lower the better.

Opening Up The Filter

The first thing you want to do is hit the filter button at the top. This will bring up the page where you can sort the millions of available domains.

I am not going to go through each metric here, but will give you some recommendations based on what you are looking for.

Expired Domains

If you want to find good expired domains it is best to keep your expectations low. So I would set the following filters:

TF: 2

DR: 10

SZ Score: 0 to 20

Tip: Even though Spamzilla does a good job filtering domains, you’re going to have to still have to take a good second look at expired domains since they are usually spammed. That means looking closely at domain snapshots and running the domain in ahrefs to see if it was ranking for junk keywords like “nike air max shoes”.

Auction Domains

If your willing to spend a bit of money, you can set your sights a bit higher here. These are the filters I use:

TF: 2

DR: 20

SZ Score: 0 to 20

Auction Ends: Current day or One day in Advance

Pro Tip: If you are bidding on auction domains, it is best not to bid on them too early. This causes the price to raise quickly. The pros wait until the last 5 minutes to bid on domains, this keeps competition low and allows you to sometime swoop in and grab domains at a super cheap price

How To Screen Domains with Spamzilla

Now that you have whittled down the list of domains to ones that have some link juice and aren’t completely spammed (hopefully) your going to want to do your due diligence and take a deeper look at the domains.

To do this your going to want to click on the Spamzilla score:

Here it brings up an awesome overview of the Wayback machine’s history. This seriously beats going through each year and it saves a ton of time and is the most important feature in screening a domain.

Be sure to go through each screenshot, because one small screenshot can mean the difference between a good domain and a bad one.

You can also easily view the domains backlinks, redirects and even the domains historical wordcount and drops. Each one of these views can mean a domain was used either as a PBN or for spam.

Check out my video for more tips on how to use Spamzilla and how to buy auction domains cheap.

How Does Spamzilla Compare to Domcop?

Domcop was a great piece of software when it first came out. It was one of the first ways to filter expired and auction domains by using Majestic and Ahrefs.

The only problem with Domcop was that these were the only features came with the service. You still had to manually filter out domains by hand.

Domcop vs Spamzilla Pricing

Domcop is not a cheap service. It comes in 3 different price points:

Newbie Plan – $56 / month

Power Plan – $98 / month

Guru Plan – $184 / month

However if you pay for the yearly plan, this reduces the price by 40%.

Spamzilla on the other hand only has one price point: $37 / month and it comes with it’s Spamzilla screening software, which saves you a whole lot of time when buying domains.

What about the Features?

Sure Spamzilla wins out on price, but what about the other features?

Well it appears that Ahrefs not in DomCop anymore, but SpamZilla does have Ahrefs when connecting it to your Ahrefs account.

Spamzilla also shows DNS History and domain drops count (how many times a website expired) which is useful to know when manually checking if a domain was used as a PBN.

Spamzilla features Historic snapshots from Archive.org and Screenshots.com and Domcop does not. Spamzilla has a WayBack Exporting tool, which allows you to download a website from Archive.org quickly and easily.

Domcop really doesn’t match up well to Spamzilla…

Is Spamzilla Worth It?

If you are serious about buying domains and were considering Domcop or Register Compass than you can’t go wrong with Spamzilla.

It does everything it promises to do, and it does it cheaper than similar programs with a lot less features.

Spamzilla is constantly adding new features and working with more auction domain companies, so I feel like it is only a matter of time before they raise their prices.

So if you have been looking for a way to streamline your domain buying, I highly suggest checking out Spamzilla and getting it at the current price.

Hustle Life was started by Jeremy Harrison in 2016. It started out as a way to share what I learned from different side hustles. It has now grown to become a resource to help people find their perfect side hustle opportunity.

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